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Thomson family's legacy lies in the art world

Not so long ago, Roy Thomson owned one of the biggest newspaper chains in the world, with more than 200 titles in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, including what then was regarded as the greatest paper in the English language, the London Times.

But the enduring legacy of the Thomson family is not newspapers, nor the Thomson Reuters information services giant that the Thomsons committed to after selling off all but Toronto’s Globe and Mail. Nor is it the estimated $22-billion Thomson fortune, making third-generation family steward David Thomson the richest person in Canada and one of the 30 wealthiest in the world. That is a fortune that traces to Roy Thomson, son of a Toronto barber, scaring up $201 to buy a radio frequency in North Bay, Ont. in 1931. (All figures in Canadian dollars.)

The Thomson legacy, flourishing some 83 years after amassing the Thomson family fortune commenced, is Roy Thomson Hall, home of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the principal concert hall of Canada’s largest city.

It is the astonishing renovation of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), already one of the world’s largest art museums before Roy’s son Kenneth and grandson David spearheaded a 47 per cent increase in the AGO’s art viewing space executed to near-perfection by the Toronto-born Frank Gehry, among the world’s most renowned architects.

And it is the donation to the AGO by Kenneth Thomson — or Ken, as the low-key tycoon preferred to be known in his Toronto home base — of a staggering collection of close to 2,000 art works, many of them masterpieces.

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Ken Thomson’s death, in 2006 at his office of an apparent heart attack at age 82, saw his eldest child, David, take up an AGO transformation still two years’ away from completion. Gehry’s triumph in “humanizing” and making more navigable an AGO hodgepodge of exhibition spaces resulting from seven previous expansions since the AGO first opened (as the Art Museum of Toronto) in 1911 is itself a masterpiece, no less than Ken Thomson’s donation of Peter Paul Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, a 17th-century painting for which Thomson paid a stunning $117 million, narrowly outbidding New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ken Thomson still held sway over a conglomerate of newspapers, real estate, North Sea oil, trucking and insurance companies when the proposed New Massey Hall found itself short of its fundraising target for a 2,630-seat hall to replace the 88-year-old Massey Hall as Toronto’s top concert venue. Thomson’s gift of $4.5 million finally brought to a close the most ambitious cultural fundraising campaign in Canadian history, and the hall took its current name in honour of the donor’s late father.

The Thomson family’s art works donated to the AGO — the finest private art collection in the country — were valued at the time at about $300 million. The Thomson’s donated another $50 million toward the $276-million renovation costs. And they created a permanent AGO endowment with another $20-million donation.

The Thomsons’ AGO commitment inspired other private-sector donors. Notable among them are the 26 Toronto families of Italian heritage whose collective $13-million donation paid for the new AGO’s splendid Galleria Italiana, the curved timber-and-glass Dundas Street West façade from which views of a cityscape of neighbouring 19th-century heritage buildings are possible. More recently, the food-retailing tycoon Galen Weston established the Weston Family Learning Centre at the AGO, open since 2011.

Gehry, who visited the AGO as a child — it is close to his childhood home in Kensington Village — first met with Ken Thomson and AGO president Matthew Teitelbaum eight years before the transformed AGO would be unveiled. Gehry’s AGO renovation met with unusually wide acclaim for, among other things, its extensive use of natural light and natural materials like Douglas fir that have brought a warmth unusual to an institution.

The new AGO is part of the vast upgrading of Toronto’s cultural infrastructure in recent years – including the Four Seasons Performing Arts Centre, the Royal Ontario Museum redesign, the expansion of the Ontario College of Art and Design (now OCAD University), an addition to the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Arts and a new National Ballet School. Gehry’s AGO might not be the best of these – such matters are subjective - but none of the other landmarks surpass what the Teitelbaum-Thomson-Gehry partnership created as a welcoming venue to enjoy art.

While he is active at the board level at Thomson Reuters, what David Thomson most values is art and his privacy. In the only extensive interview he has given, for a 1994 book about his alma mater Upper Canada College, David Thomson said, “When you try to live a more balanced life, traditional businessmen think that you are not a real man.” That the son and grandson of a Roy Thomson obsessed with business each found balance, and made time to be civic builders, has well served the millions of patrons of Roy Thomson Hall and the AGO, and the artists whose work is showcased there.

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